An Alternate Lifestyle, Part 5

The final act of our indefensible alliance with continuity has been uploaded for your perusal. Before Sunday’s Guildhall event, we got up at fuck o’clock to play golf here. It’s pretty much official, the sport stuck. If I have the compulsion to do something even two times, that’s not just enthusiasm - it’s virtually tradition.

This part of Texas is - contrary to virtually every broadcasted image - populated almost entirely by actual human beings as opposed to ridiculous caricatures with ostentatious belt buckles. We did see one cowboy hat, without which we might not have felt we were engaging in an authentic experience, but outside of that capacious chapeau Texan icons were few and far between. Also, Texas is the hottest place on the fucking Earth. The pavement radiates heat even at one o’clock in the morning when you are walking to the grocery store because you are starving. I was thinking about how young people might appreciate this phenomenon when a cyclone of cockroaches devoured my legs down to the femur.

Our question and answer thing ran about two hours with a break in the middle, and there were a few good ones this time out. The one that really stuck out to me concerned how we’re portrayed by other comic strips, as either impenetrably aloof, immeasurably wealthy, or simply as hostile psychopaths. We are, it would seem, wholly alien to this world and have no right to nor role in its natural ecosystem. The answer included comments from both myself as well as my recently returned accomplice, but to touch on probably the most important point, it’s actually not so long ago that we were (in our righteous campaign) trying to start shit with fellow webcomic User Friendly, whose only crime was being more popular than we were. We were edgy, you understand, very edgy indeed, and we were assholes of the worst sort, a reality which was well established before any general enthusiasm for our work or even before the emergence of the consumer Internet. So, the notion that young comics need to denigrate what we do here - by the very methods we ourselves employed, in their position - I mean, I guess I don’t really care about that. That doesn’t even merit the Alanis Morissete School of Irony. The fact remains that it is my job to play videogames with my best friend. And my wife is hot.

You can attract our stern attention, it is possible, but I do have to warn you that you probably won’t care about your imagined feud with us once you do it. How about you toil for years on your comic, doing the best work you can, until by some combination of reader largesse or business acumen you’re able to live completely on the proceeds from your creative output. Then, set aside money and time for charitable acts like scholarships and toy drives. Man, that’d really burn me up. Boy.

The night at Gameworks (set up by the inestimable ElderCat) satisfied me in all respects, although clearly, Joey’s hypnotic extemporaneous stylings or Matthew’s admirable personal investment in the written word would have been themselves reason enough to visit. I think that Kansas City may have better barbecue, Texas, but they don’t have the sweltering, molten heat that subdues human intellect. So, you guys each have something.